Elaine Equi has been publishing her observant, often playful poetry for some 30 years, extending and deepening the range of her intrinsically wry voice.

Equity' is only two letters away from 'equality,' after all, and who would object to that? But in those two letters is a world of difference. 'Equity' is intrinsically unjust because it demands equality of outcome and not equality of opportunity.

I don't think equality is intrinsically valuable, meaning in and of itself. I'm not against inequality... if Bill Gates gets another hundred million dollars, it's no skin off my nose.

Design is a way of life, a point of view. It involves the whole complex of visual communications: talent, creative ability, manual skill, and technical knowledge. Aesthetics and economics, technology and psychology are intrinsically related to the process.

If you feel an unquenchable thirst in you, welcome it. Celebrate it. In children, this thirst presents itself as curiosity. In adolescents, it appears as a search for love, for belonging. In young adults, it manifests itself as a search for worldly success, validation, recognition and acceptance in society. And when you are past your mid-30s...latest by your 40s...it appears as a search for meaning. Slowly, if you are tuned, and are in sync with the energy that created you, you discover something magical! You awaken to the truth that Life is intrinsically meaningless. And bringing meaning to your Life is your responsibility. You do that by following your Bliss, by choosing not to postpone your Happiness!

Life intrinsically has no meaning. You came with nothing. You will go with nothing. But you have the opportunity to make your Life meaningful. You can do this in small doses by doing multiple things that you love doing. Or you can do this expansively by being engaged with a larger-than-you cause, your Purpose. Here 'meaningful' really means making each moment count, by living it fully, by celebrating it! Simply, as long as you do what makes you come alive, even if you don't define it or connect it with a sense of Purpose, you are living meaningfully!

Happiness is what we make of our situation, not what the situation intrinsically is," Leah sighed.

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

Women intrinsically understand human dynamics, and that makes them unstoppable. Unfortunately, the average man is less adroit at fostering such rivalries, which is why most men remain average; males are better at hating things that can't hate them back (e.g., lawnmowers, cats, the Denver Broncos, et cetera). They don't see the big picture.

To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing's pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly?but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets' checkouts, airport gates, SUVs' backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can't think anyone really believes that today's so-called 'information society' is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down.

I really think I write about everyday life. I don't think I'm quite as odd as others say I am. Life is intrinsically, well, boring and dangerous at the same time. At any given moment the floor may open up. Of course, it almost never does; that's what makes it so boring.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade a musical idea no matter how innovative is threatened.